Editorial

Observability holds the key to an effective Shift Left

John Atkinson, director of solutions engineering, UK & Ireland, at Riverbed Technology, argues that unified observability is empowering organisations to thrive amidst challenging conditions.

Posted 16 February 2023 by Christine Horton


With interest rates rising and a recession on the horizon, most of the technology market has experienced a significant drop in investment. However, some areas remain prime for growth. A recent IDC survey found that half of respondents expect their observability budgets to increase in the coming years.

This is because observability facilitates the ‘Shift Left’. A concept originally used in DevOps to reference testing early and often to prevent issues down the line and has now been adopted more widely across NetOps and Service Desk. Where automated solutions were once relied upon to deliver the Shift Left, unified observability is now offering a more intelligent approach. Empowering enterprises to thrive amidst challenging conditions.

Traditionally, Shift Left’s focus has often been on growing software’s capabilities, improving reliability and performance, scaling up, and increasing security. But there are many more benefits it can offer NetOps as it improves performance and productivity for employees at all levels. Which in turn creates a better company culture, while boosting customer satisfaction. And for the many organisations managing an exponentially growing amount of data, it helps manage their increasingly complex infrastructure.

Using unified observability to Shift Left helps companies that want to redirect IT staff from routine, tactical jobs and place them on more strategic projects like infrastructure optimisation or predictive modelling. So, while Shift Left testing does improve network performance, it also allows businesses to meet their objectives by giving senior IT leaders the ability to focus on improving the company’s bottom line.

Maximising the benefits of runbooks

Most enterprises depend on highly skilled professionals to identify and resolve IT challenges. However, these already rare and expensive commodities are becoming even harder to find, with older workers retiring and younger generations lacking the required skills. This problem is being exacerbated as tech infrastructure grows, resulting in a cascading number of incidents or system faults. Experts are stretched thin keeping their tech running before even contemplating strategic initiatives, which is where their efforts would be best placed. And overall, the entire company suffers as more team members are pulled away from vital tasks that would grow the business to focus on troubleshooting.

Observability platforms offer a Shift Left solution by codifying experts’ experience and domain knowledge within automated runbooks, allowing for the easy retention of key expertise. Senior leaders’ knowledge of problems and solutions can be input into guides that can be made into workflows customised to the business’s needs. With these runbooks in place, companies can fix problems faster, while reducing pressure on experts and providing junior IT staff with the opportunity to learn and grow more quickly within their roles.

Actively reducing alert fatigue

IT personnel are often inundated with monitoring alerts, so much so that many will just turn them off and wait to be contacted about an issue. The problem is that not only are there too many alerts, but they also tend to provide very little information about where a problem has occurred, what has gone wrong, or what needs to be done to reach a resolution. This makes pinpointing critical events amongst the overwhelming noise close to impossible – the alternative being investigating every alert manually, an impossibly time-consuming task.

Observability platforms tackle this by using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to correlate issues that affect the business. The platforms also use pre-built runbooks to carry out automated, low-code investigations to collect evidence, contextualise events, and set priorities for responses. By automating the identification of issues, both junior and senior IT staff can respond to issues more quickly and then return to tasks that deliver true value.

Observability in practice

Enterprises have long valued traditional monitoring tools, and with good reason, but the truth is that their abilities are limited. They rely upon metrics based on preconceived ideas of potential issues. By contrast, with observability, IT staff can explore the unknown or previously unseen events, proactively seeking out ways of safeguarding their infrastructure.

Observability also facilitates the collation of data from separate tools and its analysis with AI and ML to provide further context. By merging monitoring, visibility, and automation, observability can effectively examine a system’s output to establish its status and identify actionable insight.

With unified observability in place, enterprises receive full-fidelity data across the enterprise on transactions, packets, and workflows. This information improves issue resolution in numerous areas, from workflow bottlenecks to cyberattacks for example. As such, all parts of the organisation, from the help desk to the DevOps team, can benefit from the advantages of a Shift Left philosophy.

What’s more, observability can improve mean time to resolution (MTTR) and first-level resolution rates by providing one-click investigations into client device, network, or backend component problems to identify the source of delays. In addition, it can identify likely causes and support resolutions by analysing the common characteristics of users experiencing the same issues. Typically, organisations using observability have 15 percent fewer service desk tickets and reduced MTTR by 24 percent.

Why emphasising automation is critical

IT environments are only going to continue to grow in both size and complexity. Currently, they cover anything from on-premises data centres, multiple clouds (public, private, hybrid), and mobile and remote devices, to the increasing number of edge locations and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. But the teams that service these environments are not matching their growth.

At present, intelligent automation is the only way to feasibly address these problems. With observability platforms, enterprises gain the advanced automation abilities of AI and ML. These technologies reduce the time taken to pinpoint and correct problems by compiling information from a range of sources enterprise-wide, correlating issues, and determining likely causes, drawing on no-code runbooks built using senior IT expertise. As such, they are a critical component in winning the battle against the non-stop noise of never-ending monitoring alerts. Ensuring that only critical challenges are handed over for human intervention.

Making the most of Shift Left

It’s unequivocal that Shift Left improves software quality, security, and ultimately business performance by moving key processes into the early stage of development. However, today’s IT environments have grown in scope and complexity to the point where holistic infrastructure visibility and advanced analytics tools have become a must.

With unified observability, a Shift Left becomes more successful. As these tools optimise data collection and analysis, pushing MTTR down, and empowering IT experts to zero in on activity that will accelerate digital transformation and maximise their company’s financial performance.